We did talk about device tree, but I didn't dwell on it because it is just another piece of the puzzle in cleaning up arm. Device tree support for ARM is now in mainline, and it is full steam ahead to adapt many of the current ARM subarchitectures.

As such, where minimizing differences by processor was clean and relatively straightforward for x86, expecting it to continue to work well for ARM is nonsensical. I really think Linus is missing the forest on this one.

Not true. Pretty much all of us maintainers agree that the duplication of code and infrastructure in arch/arm is ridiculous. It has to be fixed, and we're actively working on it. Linus was perfectly correct in his statements.